Research
Job Market Paper
‘Will your license help my code?’ Evidence from a natural experiment on GitHub
Abstract: Do license terms governing collaborative teamwork affect project success? I address this question in the context of open innovation, specifically – open source software development. I propose ways to optimize the roles played by platforms to encourage license adoption, while negotiating the intrinsic relationship between developers and their communities. My empirical analysis is based on a natural experiment which was created on the code hosting platform GitHub, where exogenous variation in licensing terms occurred due to a policy shift at the platform level. This policy shift encouraged new users to adopt licenses. I use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of this policy shift on new users. I find strong evidence showing this nudge was successful in convincing new users to adopt licenses. However, only a subset of repositories succeed in the long term, depending on the characteristic of the communities to which these repositories belong. My theoretical model seeks to characterize these communities, and provide a framework for future policy interventions surrounding licenses in open innovation.
Other (selected) research papers
‘Are You Listening?’ Sentiment Diffusion in GitHub
Available at the Academy of Management Proceedings, 2022: https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2022.10036abstract
Abstract: Do expressed sentiments affect remote-workers? My paper addresses this question in the important context of open innovation, using extensive online communication data on GitHub. I use the VADER sentiment analyzer to determine latent sentiment in open source software developer communication, and study the correlation of individual sentiments within developer teams. I employ an instrumental variable identification strategy to identify peer effects in sentiment diffusion. I find significant, positive correlation within in-group sentiments, which suggests potential channels through which sentiments can propagate. I also find sentiments expressed by an individual does not affect the entire team, and this suggests expressed sentiments tend to attenuate rather than magnify via propagation. These findings provide useful lessons to managers of remote working teams regarding ways to manage employee morale and team cohesion.
Older research projects
How Leadership drives Performance: Evidence from Virtual Teams,
Joint work with Jerome Hergueux and Gabriel Smagghue
Abstract: The relation between leadership styles and its impact on team performance has been widely debated across disciplines. Our paper uses a novel dataset describing developer communication in GitHub over eighty-seven months to understand the role played by team leaders in project success. Our research conducts a comparative analysis of technical vis a vis inspirational leadership in driving project success. We characterise team leaders along the dimensions of ‘inspirational’ and ‘technical’ leadership. We use a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to find that at the early stages of a leader’s participation in their team, technical leaders provide a stronger positive impact on project success, with respect to inspirational leaders. We also find that leader-follower communication plays a crucial role in driving project success. Finally, we provide preliminary findings regarding evolution of leaders in open source teams; these findings are currently a work in progress.
How much do consumers value interoperability? Evidence from the price of DVD players
Joint work with Kristofer Erickson and Jesus Rodriguez-Perez
Available at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Abstract: Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems provide manufacturers the ability to control the use of their products after sale, imposing legal and technical restrictions on the functionality available to consumers. For example, the DRM system used in consumer DVD prevents players from being interoperable with unauthorised copies and well as authorized content (films) sold in different regions of the globe. Theory on interoperability and the ‘installed base’ identifies local benefits to consumers who either stay with an incompatible standard or adopt an interoperable system, with welfare effects from both cases. We explore the relationship between interoperability features and consumer willingness to pay, using an original dataset on consumer media players.
Using a quasi-experimental setup, we use an Average Treatment Effect (ATE) estimator to evaluate the effect of interoperability features in new and used DVD players obtained from Amazon product listings. Nearest-neighbour matching is used to control for features such as manufacturer, technical specifications and condition of players. Based on analysis of the price and sales performance of 277 DVD players, we find that players capable of playing new file formats command an average price which is $19.86 higher than the non-treated group. However, we find limited support for the impact of backwards compatibility on price, either for new or used players. The ability to play DVDs from multiple regions shows a moderately significant effect on price in our sample.